Required Reading (silva keep out)

[PhoneLobster]

Well, it's largely a silly exercise. But I think there is another basic rule or two that needs going over, and there are examples of it on this thread...

Paranoia and Call Of Cthulhu don't fucking count
You can say something entirely accurate about RPGs like "it's a co-operative game about defeating enemies!" and some asshole will protest and declare it is about "deep uber story and BASKETWEAVING!!!11!1!". They will be wrong they will when pressed actually give examples of their own play that prove that their story telling is as shallow and sucky as anyones, that basketweaving is as marginal and unimportant as anyone elses, and that actually they mostly ran around co-operatively defeating enemies.

But then someone will say "what about Paranoia!?". And the answer is... yeah what about it? So what. Who cares? Yes, Paranoia IS different. And it is basically a single outlier that is sufficiently different to all other RPGs that it frankly should probably be considered a different genre to, well, all the rest. It is definitively a non-co-operative RPG about comedy explosions and back stabbing. It's interesting, and it might even be nice if there WERE more examples of it's genre, but it tells us just about nothing productive about the genre of co-operative RPGs that aren't meant to be comedy train wrecks with bureaucratic laserings.

Similarly people will point at Call Of Cthulhu. Now those people are wrong not just because Call Of Cthulhu is an edge case, but because actually Call Of Cthulhu when playable at all is significantly closer to the standard RPG in it's function and limitations than people like to pretend. But all the same... fuck those guys, pretty much every RPG other than those two, and possibly the obscure Toon share a lot of things in common. And if we sit down and say "Fuck it, we can't talk about this because it's different in Paranoia!" Then we can't talk about any fucking thing.

Call Of Cthulhu isn't as hardcore as internet tough guys think it is
And this is worth pointing out. Again. So I will do it with a mildly altered piece from the front of my obscure old Horrific Game preamble.

In practice "Horror Mystery" games still have some basic requirements in order to be fun. They do NOT get to suspend the normal rules of "losing constantly is not fun", "what is fun", "how often can we lose characters and still have a story" and "how much table time can we even spend making replacement characters" etc...

Players do NOT want to play the adventures of the doomed guy who dies and never finds out what was going on.

They WANT to play the adventures of SCOOBY FUCKING DOO. Those adventures go like this.

1)Form rag tag Team of them damn kids and their damn dog.
2)Oh no a “Mystery!”
3)Run in circles waving arms
4)NOW you encounter the monster “Run Away!”
5)Get more serious about running in circles waving your arms maybe scream and giggle a bit
6)Defeat monster (switch with 7 if you want)
7)Solve Mystery (switch with 6 if you want)
8)Damn you guys and your damn dog.
9)The end

Note that that DOESN'T include “And before act one was even over we found Shaggy and Thelma dead naked and dismembered in the freezer, characters were rerolled and we got Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble joining the party until THEY got eaten by a Gru later in the mystery and we ALL got replaced by Josie the Pussy Cats...”

It ALSO does not include “We never found out WTF was going on”

It DEFINITELY doesn't include “We lose”

It DOES include comedy, zany antics, a bunch of stupid, and your damn dog.

I mean you can TOTALLY KO Shaggy every five seconds, dose him up with drugs until he is sedated (he probably does that anyway), hell, shoot him in the knee caps, but you can't just KILL him casually, gratuitously or repeatedly even if we make him a cheap throw away easy to make rules lite character in a low value throw down system. We are still invested in Shaggy and if he is the one who stumbles over ALL the damn clues in the first act then there just plain isn't a story and as such isn't a game without him.

You can even kill Thelma, but if you do she probably needs to either die right in the big fight at the end, and ideally in an explosive and hilariously entertaining manner that ultimately doesn't prevent them from winning, or needs to almost immediately come back and continue helping the gang as a Crime Solving Banshee or something.

At a stretch Fred can cop it in the first two minutes of the show before any of the plot is invested into him, but only if his replacement lasts basically the rest of it, we can't sit here ALL day thinking of variant neckerchief colours for the latest Fred Clone.

I mean you can walk away with a partial victory, you can win but lose the life of a much loved major character in the process, you can save the world at the cost of every PC life in the gang, you can solve the mystery, stop the murders but Jack The Ripper gets away for another 50 years, you can join the forces of darkness and declare victory through defeat, you can at a stretch have everyone lose in SUCH an explosive and hilarious manner that it's a win on sheer FUN.

But you CANNOT ABSOLUTELY CANNOT just lose. And the gang MUST FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING ON either before or after winning in SOME sort of paltry way. Because that's what the whole game was about and if the end of the game is "well you will never know" then no one will be satisfied.

YES Cthulhu and other "dark" games wank on endlessly about high PC fatality and an environment of despair. Well that's just pure wank. Talk big about DOOM! with all the melodrama you can muster then play like a big old softy just trying to scare kids out of his theme park, it makes for a better gaming experience.

GMs who don't learn that lesson run shitty games of Cthulhu that no one ever wants to play again. Hell. They give the entire Genre a bad rep.

[Neurosis]

Man, I disagree with everything PL said about Call of Cthulhu just about as hard as humanly possible. Just want to register that for the record. Not going to actually argue the point, though, because come on you guys, PhoneLobster. I know how those arguments go.

[PhoneLobster]

Feel free to disagree with someone else over it. But the facts are simple.

The games of Cthulhu/"Horror Mystery" that people actually enjoy more closely resemble Scooby Doo "Antics, monster, run away!, antics!, solution!, damn you and your damned dog!" games than they resemble "Adventures of Doomed Sad Guys Who All Suffer And Die And Never Solve Anything".

Go ahead and argue with someone else about it. But if you think doomed sad guy adventures are fun you've just been taken in by the wank and refuse to admit the actual dynamic of the genre. Which leaves you in a position where games you run in the genre at best are only good by random chance, probably with that chance counter productively stacked against the fun outcomes.

[Cyberzombie]

Call of Cthulhu is still about defeating enemies. It's just that the majority of your defeats don't come from big guns, but rather disrupting rituals or driving a big ship into Cthulhu and sending him back to sleep. Or maybe you're a whistleblower who goes to the authorities and the army storms Innsmouth.

Sure maybe you go insane after you do that, but CoC characters still make a difference in the world and defeat things, even if not permanently. CoC characters meet tragic ends frequently but they still score some victories.

[MGuy]

Man, I disagree with everything PL said about Call of Cthulhu just about as hard as humanly possible. Just want to register that for the record. Not going to actually argue the point, though, because come on you guys, PhoneLobster. I know how those arguments go.

You can say you disagree 'for the record' but that don't mean dick on this forum. You might as well give your own version of things or there's no point in even responding.

[Zaranthan]

Call of Cthulhu is still about defeating enemies. It's just that the majority of your defeats don't come from big guns, but rather disrupting rituals or driving a big ship into Cthulhu and sending him back to sleep. Or maybe you're a whistleblower who goes to the authorities and the army storms Innsmouth.

Sure maybe you go insane after you do that, but CoC characters still make a difference in the world and defeat things, even if not permanently. CoC characters meet tragic ends frequently but they still score some victories.

That sounds exactly like "saving the world at the cost of every PC's life/sanity". Stop making me agree with PhoneLobster.

[brized]

Schwarzkopf, just going by my own experience running CoC for players, the fun factor went up as I steered things away from red herrings, sudden doom, and inevitable sanity loss and more towards Scooby Doo meets Evil Dead.

It went like this:

Ran The Haunting for 3 PCs. By the end, one PC got remotely dominated by the big bad, killed another PC, then restrained until she recovered. The remaining PCs freaked out, burned the house down with the dead PC in it, and ran. The end. PCs sad.

Ran Masks of Nyarlathotep for 4 players running 6 characters total.

The PCs kidnapped the shopkeep of the Juju house:

Then they scored some heroin and used it on him as a means of interrogation. After they got their info they murdered him, stuffed him in the trunk of their car, then drove it into a lake by the house of a PC living on the outskirts of NYC.

Later the PCs went all Army of Darkness with building custom melee weapons before breaching the basement in Harlem. They annihilated the cultists outside, but when they found the chakota in the basement:

They opened up the hatch enough to see, took the sanity loss, dropped lanterns and gasoline inside, shut the hatch, ran like hell, set fire to the Ju-ju house, and skipped town onto London.

---

The PCs HATED the painter's house in London. HATED IT. It claimed 3 lives, 2 from PCs killing each other. They were pissed, so after that I removed all purely red herring and/or pointless deathtrap segments, and made Cthulhu Mythos act as damage reduction vs. sanity loss. Player enjoyment went way up after that.

The PCs staked out/investigated the nightclub in London. 3 of the 6 PCs followed up by breaking into the club owner's house at night to interrogate him. The owner thought they were robbers and blew one of the PC's heads off with a shotgun. The remaining PCs subdued him, interrogated him, realized they had the wrong guy. So what do they do? They murder him, his wife, make it look like the dead PC was banging the guy's wife, burn down the house to make it look like a murder-suicide, and run.

They were later attacked by cultists and captured/interrogated one at a house they bought outside London. They find out about found the cultist hideout headed by the museum owner, but upon scoping it out they decided hell no.

They set up a homeless informant network but had the informants drop info directly into their house's mailbox. So eventually some cultists captured a homeless person and got the mailbox info. The PCs also still had that hostage in their basement, so some cultists found them and started staking them out in a car across the street. What do the PCs do?

One PC is a disguise expert, so he disguises himself as a fat American tourist, walks out from their house and asks the cultists what they're doing while the other PCs watch from the windows. The cultists pull him into their car, but the other PCs marshal out from the house and blow away the cultists as they try to drive away...In the street. In a residential neighborhood. So what do they do? Burn down the cultist's car, burn down their own house (with the captive cultist in it), drive their car to the harbor, dump their car into the harbor, then skip town to Shanghai.

---

I made one exception to the red herring/deathtrap encounters: the demon cat in Shanghai.

After investigating the demon cat and its intended victim, The PCs "defeated" it by using chloroformed tuna on its normal cat form to knock it out for 1 round. Yes, its CON is actually low enough for it to be poisoned while in its normal cat form. They then then tied buttered toast to it and threw it into the air as it woke up to trap it in a perpetual motion loop. I figured it's a metaphysical being, so why not. It transformed into its demon form while spinning endlessly just above the ground.

They tried to kill it, couldn't, so they panicked, knowing it would snap their shit up as soon as the toast came loose. To save themselves they nudged it to the victim's doorstep and fast talked the victim into answering the door with his eyes closed as they gave the final nudge. The whirling demon cat hamburgerized him in his doorway. Having completed its mission, the demon cat returned to the celestial realm.

Most of them were standing near the doorway so they got drenched in gibs and blood. So what do they do? They go into the guy's house to wash up. As they're finishing, the police show up. They could have all escaped through the bathroom window, but one character suffered too much sanity loss from witnessing the victim's horrific death and made a stand against the Chinese police. He got beaten down, so the player's other character tried to come in and save him at the last minute. They both died.

Other highlights include linking up with the local revolutionaries, then using a speedboat to chase the superpowered yacht of the Chinese cult leader before it could go in its hyper mode. They got a lucky headshot on him before he could drop a tsunami spell on their asses. So they then commandeer the yacht, then impersonate him at the volcano island cult stronghold to get inside, and then loose volleys of grenades upon the cultists and the big bad London sorcerer underground, meeting one of the conditions for victory of the whole adventure.

The avatar of the Bloated Woman then appeared and almost immediately claimed the life of one PC.

The remaining PCs fled, but they weren't as fast as the Bloated Lady. So one made a stand against it in the doorway to the stairs going up...with a bandoleer full of grenades. He collapsed the doorway on them both as the avatar sucked out his brains. The remaining PCs made their getaway on the superyacht before the local shoggoth could catch it and take it down.

There were a few other PC deaths along the way, but it was mostly their fault and/or them directly killing themselves/each other. One character made it from the start of Masks to the very end, in part because another player made it a point to ensure that character's survival from start to finish. He was the one that sacrificed himself against the avatar of the Bloated Woman.

We all fondly remember Masks of Nyarlathotep. My players consider it by far the most fun they've had in a TTRPG, despite all the deaths along the way.[/img]

[Nihnoz]

You can say something entirely accurate about RPGs like "it's a co-operative game about defeating enemies!" and some asshole will protest and declare it is about "deep uber story and BASKETWEAVING!!!11!1!".

uhhh they're about decision making, aren't they? and defeating enemies is just a subset of that, isn't it? That's what sets RPGs apart from every other kind of game, yeah? You have a framework of rules that cover mostly any action you'd want to cover, with a fictional layer placed on top that justifies what you're trying to do. There's nothing about fucking enemies or co-op, that's not a definition of RPGs, those are traits that RPGs have.

[MGuy]

You can say something entirely accurate about RPGs like "it's a co-operative game about defeating enemies!" and some asshole will protest and declare it is about "deep uber story and BASKETWEAVING!!!11!1!".

uhhh they're about decision making, aren't they? and defeating enemies is just a subset of that, isn't it? That's what sets RPGs apart from every other kind of game, yeah? You have a framework of rules that cover mostly any action you'd want to cover, with a fictional layer placed on top that justifies what you're trying to do. There's nothing about fucking enemies or co-op, that's not a definition of RPGs, those are traits that RPGs have.

I don't think 'decision making' is terribly helpful in describing anything. I make decisions every day at work but my job isn't about 'decision making'.

[Nihnoz]

uhhh they're about decision making, aren't they? and defeating enemies is just a subset of that, isn't it? That's what sets RPGs apart from every other kind of game, yeah? You have a framework of rules that cover mostly any action you'd want to cover, with a fictional layer placed on top that justifies what you're trying to do. There's nothing about fucking enemies or co-op, that's not a definition of RPGs, those are traits that RPGs have.

I don't 'decision making' is terribly helpful in describing anything. I make decisions every day at work but my job isn't about 'decision making'.

They literally are though. An RPG is the back-and forth of asking questions and getting answers. You as the GM say "Well you see this situation, what do you do?" The players answer that question, and you use rules to adjudicate what happens. That's what makes an RPG an RPG. You're establishing a world, a set of characters, situations, and events, viewed through the lens of rules. The situation isn't interesting by itself, though. It's the ability of the players to act in that world through an avatar that makes an RPG satisfying, that's decision making.

[Dean]

He's arguing that decision making is involved in basically every human endeavor, not just RPG's. Laser tag is about decision making, Chess is about decision making, Baking is about decision making. Anything a human must make choices during is about decision making.

Also if someone would tl:dr the CoC story brized told that would make me happy.

[silva]

Nihnoz, your point about "decision making" strikes the right cords to me about why I play RPGs. But I dont know if I would define RPGs as an activity being about decision making. First because as an activity it involves things that are more emblematic I think (like immersion and make-believe for eg), and second because I know a bunch of players that dont play for the decision making, instead being more comfortable as an audience watching a movie or something. Making a videogame analogy, the "decision makers" would be the Fallout and King of Dragon Pass players, while the "audience" would be the Final Fantasy players.

Does it make sense ?

[Leress]

Silva, read the sign, don't post in this thread.

[Judging__Eagle]

1: Gygax was a great man

2: The DM is God

3: You should play the game, not the rules. A good DM can just change any rules that don't work.

4: Why does everything have to be balanced, not everything has to be strong. Showing off your characters weaknesses shows who's a true roleplayer.

5: Balance doesn't matter. In an RPG the story is all that matters.

How surprising to find someone that hates D&D and worships WotC just keeping up with edition warring for the sake of it. Still have no idea why these sorts of people NEED D&D so badly when they apparently never liked it to begin with. What attention whores and needy narcissists.

1.He created something, though not alone in doing so. that is all that really matters. he is like Tolkein. he is the source, but as Jackson proved, he is not the only one able to play in that sandbox. JKR herself lets people play in her sandbox with her new website where she can control it. Gygax is like the guy who "created the internet" (and I do't mean Al Gore). You have to credit him for starting something.

2. Well the DM is god, in the game. but even if it is his house, the player need not worship the one running the game, they can leave. bet someone else has already stated how the players only control ONE thing each int he world, and the DM runs the world. if you do not accept this basic concept of D&D, then stop playing it, stop talking about it, and fuck off to do something else.

3. D&D set out to be an extension of make-believe using some common ground, that is it. the common ground is NOT the game, the make-believe is. learn this and you will understand why there is more than jsut D&D but thousands of TT, computer, and other RPGs in the world. the game is still make-believe, the rules are just the themes or other nuances people chose to employ to set their RPG into.

4. this doesn't even make sense. it really just shows how the arguement is basically a case of attention whoring. this stupid "no one left behind" in schools that lets kids continue through grades even if they learn nothing and breed stupider society with participation awards. aside fromt he fact, that this isnt even what people are saying, it is this optimized bullshit and stupidity that isnt needed across the board jsut because some are too lacking in imagination they think the numbers are the game and only play with the numbers (see 3)

5. why is balance mentioned twice? double the need for attention whoring? oh right, you want to FORCE people to take part in things they don't like because they are sitting at the table. you masturbate over 4th edition fighter and their vancian spellcasting, when someone wants to play a fighter to enjoy the story and play the game with their brain on autopilot to relax. you are the fun police and get to decide how everyone must play? you must have missed naptime today. I hope they at least changed your diaper at the daycare you attend.

Emphasis mine.

Uh, how exactly do you plan on PCs managing their armies and empires Senor Mimic? The Patrons have their metaverses to conquer, and I'm not going to be arsked to run both sides of the Long Wars.

Is hard work already to manage the forces of Genesis (Gobblings, Aes Sithe), Nightmares (The Voynich Plantations, Nightmare Beasts), and Orpheus (Ghost Empires, Zombie Hordes); mang.